The great thing about Monster Hunter combat is how flexible it is. You don't build up your hunter's skills, you build up his equipment, which means you can happily switch between different weapons, armour and playstyles all you like. Monster Hunter weapons fit into three loose categories:

Reasonably Normal Weapons

Death, vanilla flavour:Sword and Shield or Dualswords

Sword and Shield is easily the most boring Monster Hunter combination, but it's functional, and good for beginners. Dualswords, meanwhile, are a more cool-looking alternative – you can't block, but you CAN dance into a melee of lesser enemies, blades swirling in a deadly ballet.

For filthy snipers:Bows and Bowguns

You need ammunition to use bows and bowguns, but you can also run away from things much more easily and play around with poison arrows and other status effects. Bowguns are heavy things, but bows, which first turned up in Monster Hunter 2, are extremely light, doubling up as adorably ineffective melee weapons for desperate last stands.

The Hammer is considered the highest-level weapon in the game, if only because you have absolutely no capacity to block while using it. They take forever to swing, but strike horribly hard when they connect. Longswords, meanwhile, are considered a bit of a cop-out by some due to their high manoeuvrability and hit radius, but they do look awfully cool. Like katanas the length of a tree.

Defying all laws of physics:The Greatsword

Perhaps the iconic Monster Hunter weapon, the lumbering Greatsword: a stupidly enormous Cloud-esque heavy weapon that many beginners mistakenly decide must be a good starting point. Instead they find themselves pecked to death by sparrows in the time it takes their hunter to wind up for one swing. Master it, though, and it does the most raw damage of anything in the game.

Tanking it:The Lance and Gunlance

The lance is a slow, ponderous and extremely bad ass weapon for people who like stomping up to things and stabbing them through the head from behind a massive shield – or, in the case of the MHF2-exclusive gunlance (my favourite weapon in videogames), stomping up to things, stabbing them though the head from behind a massive shield and then shooting them right in the face immediately afterward.

Weapons That Make Absolutely No Sense

Support players with a penchant for percussion:The Hunting Horn

Hunting horns are completely bizarre – basically, they're hammers that you play tunes on to give yourself or, more usefully, your party of hunters some handy status effects, such as super-speed or a bit of extra power. It's the most technical weapon in the game, of particular interest to team-players who want a lot of attention on the guild hall floor from potential teammates.

Transforming death-implements: The Switch Axe

Exclusive to Monster Hunter Tri, the Switch Axe is a huge, slow axe that hits hard and has no ability to block – and when you press a button, it changes into a sword. You can only use it as a slashing sword for a certain amount of time before it turns back into an axe, but man, this weapon hits hard, if tricky to use.